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Environment and Design book displays FY22: Oct 21: Landscapes of memorial

Cemeteries and Memorial Landscapes

Understanding Cemetery Symbols

"Understanding Cemetery Symbols" by Tui Snider helps history buffs, genealogists, ghost hunters and other curiosity seekers decode the forgotten meanings of the symbols our ancestors placed on their headstones. By understanding the meaning behind the architecture, acronyms, & symbols found in America's burial grounds, readers will gain a deeper appreciation for these "messages from the dead."

A Graveyard Preservation Primer

A Graveyard Preservation Primer has proven itself to be a time-tested resource for those who are seeking information regarding the protection and preservation of historic graveyards. It was first written to help stewards of early burial grounds responsibly and effectively preserve their graveyards. Much information found in the first edition of the book remains valid today. Still, much has changed in the twenty-five years since its first publication, and the new edition reflects these changes. Attitudes and the understanding of historic graveyards as an important cultural resource have grown and developed over the years. Likewise, changes in treatments have also taken place. Perhaps the most dramatic change in burial ground preservation is in the world of technology. Changes in computers and the way we use them have also changed preservation practices in historic graveyards. Discussion of technological changes in the new edition includes those in mapping, surveying, photography, archaeology, and other areas of evaluation and planning.

Gone Home

Four decades ago, folklorists Jack and Olivia Solomon began documenting Southern cemeteries, recording the names, lives, and epitaphs of thousands of the deceased. The volume they now share with us is not a Book of the Dead, but a Book of Life. The Solomons reveal here their love and respect for the "final resting places" of this world. In these pages are recorded the sorrow for a lost child, the anger over the murder of a brother, the strengths of an admired civic leader, the life of a beloved preacher, the character of a stalwart soldier, as well as the grief for a mother, a father, a son, a daughter, a wife, a husband. Many of these epitaphs console and give promise of a "better home over yonder." Others remind one of the shortness of life and the surety of death. As in life, there is wit--the humor of a wife who reminds her spouse, "I told you I was sick!"--and profundity--the laconic remark, "She hath done what she could."

Graven Images

The classic study of gravestone art. In Puritan New England, with its abiding concern for things not of this world and its distrust of forms and ceremonies, one art flourished: the symbolic art of mortuary monument stonecarvers. This carefully researched, beautifully illustrated work was the first to consider this art in depth as a meaningful aesthetic-spiritual expression. It is reissued for today's readers, with a new preface outlining changes in the field since the book appeared in 1966.

The Death Care Industry

Sites, superstitions and stories -- The cradle: the sea islands and the southeast -- Burial sites coast to coast -- African Canadian cemeteries -- Celebrity burials -- Genealogy for the beginner -- Cemetery preservation and restoration -- Benevolent societies, lodges and clubs -- Funeral and burial customs -- What's new, what's different funeral and burial customs -- Funeral homes and directories -- New Orleans, Louisiana -- Federal trade commission rules

Cemeteries and Gravemarkers

Cemeteries house the dead, but gravemarkers are fashioned by the living, who record on them not only their pleasures, sorrows, and hopes for an afterlife, but also more than they realize of their history, ethnicity, and culture. Richard Meyer has gathered twelve original essays examining burial grounds through the centuries and across the land to give a broad understanding of the history and cultural values of communities, regions, and American society at large.

Dubuque's Forgotten Cemetery

Atop a scenic bluff overlooking the Mississippi River and downtown Dubuque there once lay a graveyard dating to the 1830s, the earliest days of American settlement in Iowa. Though many local residents knew the property had once been a Catholic burial ground, they believed the graves had been moved to a new cemetery in the late nineteenth century in response to overcrowding and changing burial customs. But in 2007, when a developer broke ground for a new condominium complex here, the heavy machinery unearthed human bones. Clearly, some of Dubuque's early settlers still rested there--in fact, more than anyone expected. For the next four years, staff with the Burials Program of the University of Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist excavated the site so that development could proceed. The excavation fieldwork was just the beginning. Once the digging was done each summer, skeletal biologist Robin M. Lillie and archaeologist Jennifer E. Mack still faced the enormous task of teasing out life histories from fragile bones, disintegrating artifacts, and the decaying wooden coffins the families had chosen for the deceased. 

Life and Death on the Prairie

Iowa's Rochester Cemetery is one of the most unusual and biodiverse prairies left in America, boasting more than 400 species of plants--337 of them native to the region--on its thirteen-and-a-half acres. Among them are fifteen massive white oaks that stood watch as the surrounding landscape was converted into farmland after Euro-American settlers arrived in the 1830s. The cemetery is the last resting place of these pioneers and their descendants, down to the present. Graves and wildflowers are scattered across the hills that geologists consider sand dunes; these are held in place by the deep roots of the plants and people. Pioneer cemeteries have been recognized as important prairie remnants and seed banks ever since Aldo Leopold, another Iowa native, called attention to them in his landmark essays of the 1940s, as he developed the new field of ecological restoration. At Rochester Cemetery, the drama of the prairie's survival continues to this day, in a controversy that flares up as reliably as spring's shooting stars. To botanists across the country, this place is a pilgrimage site.

Graceland Cemetery

Graceland Cemetery in Chicago was founded in 1860 and developed over several decades by a series of landscape gardeners whose reputations today figure among the most important in the field. An exemplar of the rural cemetery type, Graceland was Chicago's answer to its eastern counterparts, Mount Auburn in Cambridge and Laurel Hill in Philadelphia. While the initial layout of the cemetery was the work of William Saunders, designer of Laurel Hill, the cemetery is most often associated with a later style of design that featured exclusive use of native plants. Graceland was considered one of the most perfect expressions of this design approach, hailed as the most "modern" cemetery in existence and "the admiration of the world." In this book, Christopher Vernon carefully recovers the history of Graceland and the many hands that helped to shape its influential layout. Following Saunders's work, a succession of individuals contributed to the long evolution of Graceland's landscape, including H. W. S. Cleveland, William Le Baron Jenney, and O. C. Simonds. 

New Orleans Cemeteries

New Orleans Cemeteries depicts the 'cities of the dead' in all their grandeur and decay, their exquisite artisanship and humble memorials, their voluminous historical accounts of the city and undefinable spiritual qualities. The definitive book on a very curious subject, New Orleans Cemeteries is as intensely visual as it is informative.

Your Guide to Cemetery Research

A guide to the fascinating practice of cemetery research, from determining an ancestor's final resting place to decoding mysterious headstone symbols.

Corpses, Coffins, and Crypts

Drawing on extensive historical and anthropological research, personal accounts, and interviews with people who work in the funeral industry, Penny Colman examines the compelling subjects of death and burial across cultures and societies. The text, enriched with stories both humorous and poignant, includes details about the decomposition and embalming processes (an adult corpse buried six feet deep without a coffin will usually take five to ten years to turn into a skeleton) and describes thevarious customs associated with containing remains (the Igala people in Nigeria have a custom of burying people in as many as twenty-seven layers of clothing). Intriguing facts are revealed at every turn; for example, in Madagascar winter was considered the corpse-turning season. This comprehensive book also includes a list of burial sites of famous people, images in the arts associated with death, fascinating epitaphs and gravestone carvings, a chronology and a glossary, and over a hundred black-and-white photographs, most of which were taken by the author.

Silent City on a Hill

Originally published in 1989, this book offers an insightful inquiry into the intellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, and founded in 1831, Mount Auburn became the prototype for the "rural cemetery" movement and was an important precursor of many of America's public parks, beginning with New York City's Central Park.This new edition has been completely redesigned in a larger format, with new photographs and a new epilogue that carries the story forward into the twentieth century. Published in association with Library of American Landscape History: http://lalh.org/

About the summaries

Summaries attached to these titles have been supplied by the book's publisher, and should be considered advertisements (jacket blurbs), not objective reviews.